Al Alvarez Quotes

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?'

It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

Well I don't write, I attempt to scribble here and there. And no, nothing ever so grand as being published.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

I think all parts come with baggage unless it is a brand new play. If one was daunted by that, you would never do anything.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

I think if you want to make a performance authentic, there are a certain amount of leaps of faith into the unknown that you have to take. Otherwise, you're not really risking anything. I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

I'm not ashamed of any work I do. You can't decide a film's fate before its release. There's no surety that your new films will be better or worse than your previous ones. You can only hope to surpass your efforts.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I think, as an artist, you want to keep going - you want to keep taking challenges; you want to be pushed, in a way - and I think Sonic Evolution does that, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable and get out of my comfort zone.

I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet.' And I've always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there's something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.

It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.